Social Media Marketing Strategy via Customer Engagement and Interaction
About the Author
John Boyle holds a Marketing and Internet Development Degree from Western Washington University. He's worked in online marketing, specializing in search and viral social marketing, for over ten years.
He has been using viral video and social networks to expand the online presence of his sketch comedy project Train of Thought resulting in features on MySpace, Yahoo!, FARK, CollegeHumor, AtomFilms and many more.
When not working in marketing and comedy John can be seen rooting for his Minnesota Twins & Vikings, watching Battlestar Galactica, 007 and Family Guy and enjoying a Guinness.
According to Stan Schroeder over at Mashable, Facebook is testing user interest in offering vanity URLs (example: facebook.com/johnboyle)…for money.
This is probably more of an effort to target businesses than actual users but I’m sure many users will bite regardless.
Facebook’s long cumbersome URLs can be frustrating for marketing purposes. Here’s a little trick I use to get around it – a simple redirect script on my own site.
Google-owned YouTube has been hitting the PRcircuit proving to everyone that content creators can make a significant amount of money on YouTube and advertisers can be successful advertising on this platform.
But the dirty little secret I wonder about is how often does YouTube feature these “Top Earners” on their front page?
I don’t need to tell you that being featured on the front page of YouTube will bring massive amounts of views…to sell advertising off of. I wonder if YouTube is doing everything they can to promote these “Top Earners” to perpetuate their PR spin of people being able to make money off content creation.
It helps encourage people to start accounts and, most importantly, gives YouTube the advertising success stories they badly need.
I’ve started a Facebook group for my sketch comedy troupe and so far the results are pretty good. It’s easy to email people and the onus to join is on Facebook members. You can’t send random friend requests to solicit new converts like on MySpace.
However my big problem is the URL. Facebook is an emerging platform that is growing rapidly and I want to include it in my marketing materials but guess which URL doesn’t look right:
I hope they watch the submissions closely because this is nothing short of playing with fire. While they’re hoping for positive ads they will undoubtedly get many negative ads as well that, even if removed, will be reposted elsewhere on the net…all with official looking “Romney for President” imagery.
Don’t they remember the failed do-it-yourself ad campaign for the Chevy Tahoe that resulted in angry anti-SUV / pro-environment ads? When viral marketing backfires it can get really ugly. I hope the Romney campaign is prepared for the potential fallout.
Many content creators just make a video, put it on YouTube and hope it goes viral. It’s tough. There’s a lot of stuff out there. This is why I try to make videos about something people can identify with.
Case in point: Barry Bonds breaking the all time home run record.
Personally I don’t like Bonds and I know I’m not alone. So I wrote a video (performed by my friend Ryan) about how Bonds signed a deal with the devil to get the record. Here’s the strategy I employed (the video is below):
1. Have it ready: We made the video over the weekend before Bonds broke the record. I uploaded it to YouTube and MySpace as private. When Bonds broke the record I just made it live.
2. Keep it short: It’s only a minute long. The longer the video the harder it is to go viral in most cases.
3. Unique delivery: A puppet Satan helps make it stand out from the crowd.
Here’s what I learned:
If there is an event that is building up to one moment (like the home run record) it is better to create something for the buildup rather than the moment. We’ve been talking about Bonds’ pursuit of Hank Aaron’s record for almost a year. If we had written a video about that the video would have legs for a lot longer. Even if the video we made goes viral all over the place it still wouldn’t get as many views as it would have over a several month period.
Google could simply use this feature on YouTube videos giving them a huge clickthru advantage but they’re choosing not to. According to WebTVWire Google is also providing thumbnails for videos on Yahoo Video, MetaCafe, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Vimeo.
It’s a smart move, one that truly speaks to Google's mission of organizing the world’s information.
I don’t like letting the cat out of the bag, especially when it comes to a business advantage but I have to give props to the new ad campaign I started on ACrappySearchEngine.com.
I was pretty skeptical of their FrivolousAds system which seems to work like Google AdWords except instead of relevant terms your ad displays on irrelevant terms:
That's the power of ACrappySearchEngine.com's patented adverting technology: FrivolousAds. Put simply, when a user does a search, FrivolousAds will deliver a completely irrelevant text ad - catching the user off guard and generating huge sales for you!
I’ll admit I didn’t think showing my ad against terms like “pizza” or “telephone repair in tulsa” would generate valuable traffic but it does. I’ve been very happy with the results and will definitely continue to advertise there and I encourage everyone to do the same. You can’t argue with results. Just to prove it to you, here’s a chart showing substantial growth I found somewhere on the internet:
To help promote Kelly Clarkson's new record, My December, her record label is relaunching her web site complete with a social networking features such as user profiles, message boards and media sharing tools. I'm assuming it will debut any time now. My December comes out June 26th.
Frankly I think it is a mistake for everyone to be making their own social network instead of investing more time marketing on existing platforms like MySpace or Facebook. The goal of social marketing is to empower users to share with other users and get them involved in the product! If everyone on a network likes the same thing who are you supposed to share it with?
